Kabir Carter: Feelings Are Rooms

Kabir Carter opens his 2017 Residency with a solo performance introducing his practice to the historic architecture of ISSUE’s 22 Boerum Theater. Recently, Carter has reduced his performances to include little to no external signal processing and effects. Instead, he uses his own physical movements and gestures to produce and modulate sound in space. In most cases, a microphone, mixer, amplifier, loudspeaker, and cabling have been the only items used.

At 22 Boerum Place, Carter attempts to perform across the threshold of acoustic feedback and execute simple tasks to activate and excite the hard surfaces of the space’s floor, walls, columns, and ceilings. Within these confines, a new collaboration emerges -- one that displays sonic results that unintentionally veer towards industrial, EBM, noise, early techno, and a variety of popular electroacoustic music styles while also adopting bodily movements and phrases that evoke a depleted take on postmodern dance.

In this way, Carter’s performances are less staged events and more like propositions for temporary, ephemeral installative works where processes for embodying the secret life of architectural acoustics are trialled and probed.

Kabir Carter’s work has been exhibited and presented throughout Europe and the United States. His interests include architectural acoustics, bioacoustics, body culture, and social dancing in the late twentieth century. He has worked as an educator at the Partisan café in Bergen and for Working Group for Sound in the Expanded Field in Copenhagen and Istanbul. Carter has been a Braunschweig Projects Fellow at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, and a Danish Arts Council DIVA Programme awardee. He is currently artist-in-residence at Aalto University’s Department of Signal Processing and Acoustics. He holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, where he was a Joseph Hartog Fellow.